WHEN HOLLYWOOD COMES TO SANTA FE, MURDER SOON FOLLOWS.
It's a glitzy group that gathers at Tony Quayles's Santa Fe home to finalize plans for his new movie. The guest of honor: feisty Dame Charlotte Saxe-Ogilvy, whose Jamaican plantation will provide the shoot's location.
But then Dame Charlotte is murdered and robbed of her priceless jewels. Reuben, a Santa Fe artist and Quayles's caretaker, is the prime suspect: the jewels are found in Reuben's paint box.
Who framed him? The answer, Reuben surmises, has flown to Turtle Bay, Jamaica, with Quayles and his entourage. And truth in that tropical paradise can be double-edged and deadly. . . .
Thus wraps up a mystery tetralogy that ranks among the oddest series I’ve ever read. Mary Lucille “Cecil” Dawkins was apparently a figure of some (obscure) note in the arts and letters field in the mid-late 20th century. She wrote a play (based on stories by Flannery O’Connor), a collection of short stories, a biography (“as-told-to” via tape recorded reminiscences) of Frances Minerva Nunnery (A Woman Of The Century), and these 4 mysteries. These are quirky books, featuring a cast of characters who float in and out of the books, and a pretty constant theme/connection with the arts - museums and galleries, painters, sculpters, writers, film and theatre personalities, and a beginning ground in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area but ranging out from there. The present volume features artist Reubin Rubin back for another appearance, picking up an odd job as “jack of all trades” to a film producer who’s hosting a group involved with his latest movie, to be set in Jamaica, and while we begin in Santa Fe we quickly find ourselves on that island, but certainly not in the “tourist” environs. Most every one of Dawkins’ characters in these books are oddball, conflicted people with issues, and that continues here. While the “murder” was in Santa Fe, all the action, investigation, and denouement happen in Jamaica. It all gets pretty confusing, and while the climax is logical/believable, it requires a good bit of “sleight of hand” to make it satisfactory. Happy to have read these, happier that I don’t need to face another.